


Three Weddings and a Funeral

by noplacespecial



Category: Hellcats
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:45:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noplacespecial/pseuds/noplacespecial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marti and Dan, over the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Weddings and a Funeral

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nic/gifts).



No one is all that surprised when invitations to Vanessa and Red's wedding start showing up in mailboxes. Marti actually gets a text from Savannah, all capitals and exclamation points, before she even gets a chance to check her mail. Then again, this is hardly a surprise - she lets herself get wrapped up in work so easily that everything else usually falls by the wayside. Some days, Wanda has to call from the other side of town just to remind her to eat and sleep. She always sighs in annoyance, brushes off the calls with curt arguments about how she's perfectly able to take care of herself, but secretly she enjoys the role reversal. Wanda is alive and thriving, clean, sober, and irritatingly perky.

She declines the plus one; she's long since left Julian in her dust, and no one who's come along since has seemed worth the time. Her days are already so full of cases and paperwork that making the effort to get dressed up, go out, eat bad food, and make awkward small talk just doesn't seem worth it most nights.

She finds herself missing college. A lot. Cheertown, while often impossible to get a decent night's sleep in, was never boring. There was always someone to cheer her up when she was on edge, to help her out when she was drowning. She cherishes the quiet of her one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city, spacious and conveniently close to the law firm she's working at, but it's not quite the paradise she always dreamed of when living in close quarters with Wanda. The Hellcats, despite all her desperate fighting against it, have changed her. She misses the fun and the camraderie. So despite the fact that Red and Vanessa's date falls in the middle of what she's already been warned will be a busy week due to tax season, she doesn't hesitate to accept.

Everyone shows up - even people she thought had lost touch years ago. Even she is barely at the fringes, a part of e-mail chains and Facebook groups, but rarely reaching out to hold those tenuous connections together with anyone other than Savannah, and to be honest that's far more Savannah's doing than hers. She still hasn't gotten the hang of the whole friendship thing, having only ever been close to a handful of people in her life, and look where that's gotten her now - she hasn't spoken to Dierdre, Rex, or Dan in ages - but Savannah is the one person that seems to get that, without ever holding it against her.

Dan is on her arm when she walks through the door, and a stab goes straight through to Marti's heart. She hadn't really realized how much seeing him would affect her, but for a few terrifying seconds she can't breathe. She ducks behind a decorative pillar, waits for the panic to subside, and when the couple first spots her she's just plain old Marti, buddy and pal. Dan goes in for a hug, but she hip-bumps him instead and makes a joke to deflect. He regards her oddly, but it's easy to concentrate on Savannah. They talk on the phone often, but haven't seen each other in person in about a month. Savannah easily waves goodbye to Dan and hooks her arm around Marti's, dragging her off to find the other Hellcats and catch up on gossip.

Marti's not entirely sure how this ends with Dan's tongue in her throat.

He crowds her against the wall of the bathroom, her legs wrapped around his waist so that anyone who enters the room would see only one pair of feet on the ground. She bites his shoulder, muffling her moans in the fabric of his suit jacket. It lasts just a few minutes, but when her feet finally hit the floor Marti is panting as if she's been running forever.

(She supposes, in a way, she has.)

"We can't keep doing this," she chokes out, that same clenching guilt from the incident in his truck churning in the pit of her stomach. Dan's expression is unreadable. "We're terrible friends," she adds numbly, knowing it this time beyond all shadow of a doubt.

"I... Ill go find Savannah," Dan responds. She looks resolutely at the ground as he leaves, and knows that there will be no last-minute turnaround, no outcome other than him leaving with his girlfriend and them never speaking of this again. In the end, they both probably love Savannah more than either of them love themselves. She doesn't know whether it's a blessing or a curse.

~*~

When little Joseph (more oft referred to as Joey, JoJo, or Hurricane Joe) is five and still full of boundless energy, Charlotte Monroe meets an insurance salesman named Rick. No one is sure who Rick loves more, mother or son, and eight short months later they're engaged.

"God this is just momumentally unfair," Savannah gripes, passing the beer bottle back to Marti, who takes a swig of her own. They've already met and mingled, and are now hiding in the grass out behind the catering tent. Savannah at least had the forethought to spread a towel beneath them so they don't stain their pale pink bridesmaid dresses.

Dan left town three weeks ago, for a great opportunity to shoot and direct an indie film with a few B-list actors that is creating a buzz and might get his name out there. It wasn't the reason for his breakup with Savannah, but from the way she tells it it was the last straw. Marti hears everything about him secondhand these days, whether from Savannah or Wanda or Travis. Most days she does her best to absorb the information, smile, nod, and push it to the back of her mind. But Savannah is undoubtedly the best friend she's ever had, so she stays engaged, offers advice, consoles her when Dan is apparently an ass and encourages when Dan is apparently the greatest thing known to man. The past year it's been more and more of the former, until finally she hears that he's out of the picture for good.

It's not the old days anymore - she can't straddle both sides of the fence, comfort Savannah then call his cell and congratulate him on the new job. They haven't been that kind of friends in so long that she's almost forgotten, years of being more than family, of finishing each others' sentences and never going more than a day at a time without contact. She's got Savannah for that now.

"Surely there's a surplus of knights in shining armor somewhere, just waiting to be found," she jokes. Savannah waves her hand dismissively.

"Pretty sure my little sister got the last one. I mean here's a guy who's willing to raise another man's kid, yet we can't even find guys willing to stick around for us, who have way less baggage?" She sighs and grabs the beer from Marti's hands again. Marti's not sure she agrees with the end of that statement, but even if she did she doesn't really know how to respond. So instead she lets Savannah drain the Miller dry and pulls two more bottles from the six pack, bumping their shoulders.

"You've got me, at least," she offers. Savannah tilts her new bottle, intiating a toast.

"To our utter failure at life," she declares. Marti clinks the glass together.

"Hear hear," she echoes. They're quiet, after that.

~*~

Meredith, a third-year law clerk in her office, gets married late into the winter holidays. Marti begrudgingly attends, if only to curry favor with her bosses. The invitation is pristinely white with hand-done caligraphy, and her pen hovers above the "I will be attending with a guest" box. She leaves it empty, because what other choice does she have?

She's really starting to get sick of this.

~*~

The call from Dierdre comes just a week after Meredith's wedding. Rex was found in his apartment, passed out in a puddle of his own vomit, needle still protruding from his arm. Dead long before the paramedics could ever have even been called.

She doesn't know how she's supposed to react.

Dierdre goes into a flurry of planning, mapping out every minute detail of the funeral, from the casket color to the type of food at the wake. Wanda nods upon hearing the news, face expressionless; to her he's been dead long ago. The guys from the record store have a few jam sessions in memorium. And outside of them, she doesn't even know anyone else from his life. She doesn't know if he had a girlfriend, a best friend, any other living family. Truth be told she only met the man a few times, each more horrific than the last, so she can't say she's surprised that he was felled by an overdose.

Travis is a godsend. He just has a way of being comforting and supportive without smothering, and Marti rewards him with several large bear hugs. Each one is wholly unexpected, but she finds herself trying to imagine going through this without him, and she just can't. Maybe not everything happens for a reason, but she'd rather not imagine how her life could have turned had she not fought for this man's hard-earned freedom. He sits at the foot of her old bed at Wanda's and strums his guitar along with hers; sometimes they talk, sometimes they just play. And when he leaves her to get some rest, she inevitably hears him sitting up late at night with her mother. She doesn't ask what's said, knows he probably knows more about Rex than either of them combined thanks to their lack of communication that hasn't fully improved, even after all these years.

In fact it's Travis who drives her to the cemetary on a clear December afternoon. It's chilly and foggy, and she shivers into a long black pea coat from high school, slightly snug on her adult frame.

The crowd of people there can barely even be described as that; more a small knot of about 15 - Dierdre, some guys from the shop, and a few unfamiliar faces. Wanda does not attend. She never tells Savannah, because Savannah, as supportive as she is, has never known how to deal with the darker side of her sordid family history. Dierdre, who has become a friend over the years, finds her hand as an aging minster recites a generic sermon. Marti squeezes back, more out of habit than actual sympathy. She still hasn't fully accepted the reality of the situation, that the father that she has twice now thought dead, who she barely got a chance to know even after discovering otherwise, is now truly gone forever. She doesn't know how to express this in a way that doesn't make her sound completely self-involved and crazy. And it's with this sudden thought that she's struck with a pang of longing for the stalwart Dan Patch, eternally her shoulder to lean on. She's spent so much time convincing herself that she doesn't need him that the second she does, without question, she truly feels the ache of his absence. But why would he be here, at a funeral for a man he's never met, to comfort a girl who has made a lifetime's habit out of pushing him away?

Except that he shows up halfway through the wake, looking a little thinner and sporting thick stubble around his jaw, eyes just as clear and bright as she remembers. She freezes.

"Don't freak out," Dierdre murmurs from beside her.

"You invited him?" she asks. Her sister nods, looking for all the world like a puppy afraid of getting scolded. She wonders, occasionally, how much time and distance it actually takes for the knee-jerk fear of abandonment to fade. It certainly hasn't between the two of them, to the point where they vacilate between screaming matches and walking on eggshells around each other. But this time she has no reason to be angry, not when the one person who has never questioned her motives, begrudged her for her fears and insecurities, is standing across the room, fidgeting like a fish out of water, clearly looking for her.

"Thanks," she says simply, and steps forward. Dan catches the movement, and their eyes meet.

And he smiles.

Marti feels years' worth of tension slide off of her shoulders, his boy-next-door grin as irresistible now as it was when she first spied him eating worms at age four. And she wonders what she was worried about, because at the end of the day this is Dan Patch. She hasn't seen him for years and the last time they spoke in person they were in a bit of a rough patch, but somehow she's not at all surprised that he's here now, when she needs him the most. She hurtles forward and buries her face in his neck, feels his arms come up around her, and breathes in deep.

After all, what are best friends for?


End file.
